El Nino's True Meaning

The Current, Like A Primal Pulse, A Welcome Sign Of Life

January 17, 1992|By William Safire, New York Times

WASHINGTON — The El Nino current is now getting a big media buildup. This long-ignored flow of warm seawater across the Pacific Ocean and down the coast of South America is being fingered as the cause of floods in Texas and one of the warmest winters on record in the East.

Don't believe it. Every 10 years I rise to write an essay about El Nino (pronounced El NEEN-yo, short for the Spanish El Nino de Navidad, or Christ Child) straightening out the climatologists and their credulous cohorts who see the great, mysterious swoosh of warm water as a troublesome ''southern oscillation.''

The oscillationists (along with their voguish allies, the neo-oscillationists) are mistaken. El Nino is not a source of destruction, to be dreaded and ultimately tamed or refrigerated or re-directed; it is like a primal pulse, to be welcomed as a sign of life.

In 1973, when I first introduced El Nino to readers in this space, a horrified hue and cry was being raised by the world's fishermen: The nice and icy Humboldt current, in which the anchovies play and supply much of the world's fishmeal protein, was being pushed aside by El Nino.

Still new to the columnist dodge, I rushed out to the CIA's headquarters to see the agent monitoring the world's soybean and anchovy production. He confirmed the fear that the catch would be bad, commodity prices would rise and bad times would follow. (I protected his identity for the sake of his children. They thought he was an undercover operative and would have reviled his mundane expertise on anchovies.)

Sure enough, because of El Nino and the shah of Iran, prices rose and a recession took hold.

Nine years later, in 1982, concurrent with a steep recession in the United States, El Nino returned at Christmastime, as befitting its name. Weird storms raged, mud slid in Utah, fair-tradewinds blew the wrong way, the northern winter was oddly warm, the Peruvian anchovies went belly up.

By that time, as a seasoned columniator, I was able to observe the correlation of climatic and economic forces, and to assure readers that neither El Nino nor the worst postwar recession would last. The refreshingly icy waters of Humboldt (renamed La Nina by hypersexist weatherpersons) would bring the climate back to normal, as it did.

Nine years later, toward the end of 1991, El Nino returned again. As always, the jet-stream set of meteorologists blamed it for storms in the Southeast, unusual cold in Moscow and a temporary reversal of global warming. Pizza-eaters are doing without their anchovy toppings.

Again, with El Nino, we have a recession. Who can now argue that precipitation is unconnected to the world economy, trade winds to trade flows, ocean currents to financial currents? The Bard knew: ''There is a tide in the affairs of men. . . .''

But now I am a veteran pundit, seeking - in this third go-round with El Nino - more than the satisfaction of cyclical certainty.

What is this warm current, so reverently named and so inexorable in its reappearance, telling us about our world? Clamber up Olympus and catch the view:

First: With all our satellites up and our sonars down, we really know little about the huge forces that determine which way the wind blows. A great deal of our confident prediction, based on such expensive intelligence, is so much guesswork.

Second, the big current event instructs us that there is no flow without an ebb, no trend without a counter-trend, though it may not be equal or opposite. The business cycle within each decade; the Schlesinger political cycles in each generation; the Kondratieff wave of history every half-century - all this suggests that what goes around comes around.

Finally, El Nino's most puissant lesson: What seems terrible may just be necessary. Maybe Humboldt needs a breather, the winds need a shift, the tectonic plates need to ease their tension, and Earth needs a break from behavior expected by its inhabitants.

Therefore, fellow fixers, stop being so sure about the wisdom of flattening out the cycles, despite the occasional pain. Belay that redistributive urge; pause before fiddling with the planetary rhythms. A pulse is the feelable end of a heartbeat, and what seem to us to be the predations of El Nino may be the cadence of the cosmos.